Please use this topic to discuss NASA's Commercial Crew integrated Capability initiative to facilitate the development of a U.S. commercial crew space transportation capability.

DChudwinMember

Posts: 1033From: Lincolnshire IL USARegistered: Aug 2000

posted 08-02-2012 07:06 PM
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that SpaceX and Boeing tomorrow will receive full funding for the next round of commercial crew contracts, and that Sierra Nevada will get partial funding. If this is true, then ATK and Blue Origin are the odd men out.

Teams headed by the Boeing Co., SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp. will be receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from NASA over the next 21 months for further development of spaceships capable of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station, knowledgeable sources told NBC News today.

NASA is to make the official announcement of the winning commercial teams on Friday morning — but NBC News' Cape Canaveral correspondent, Jay Barbree, received word from two sources who were informed of the decision in advance, on condition of anonymity. The sources did not discuss how much money any of the companies would be receiving.

posted 08-03-2012 05:08 PM
Given the level of political "pull" (and they are quite technically competent too) I'm not surprised that Boeing got the largest award. I'm very glad that SpaceX got fully funded, and Sierra Nevada got half funding also.

It should be interesting to see if these 3 companies continue to get the funding a year or two out in the upcoming Congress. Again, I suspect Boeing will get fully funded, and given their proven track record I suspect SpaceX will get funding too. I'm concerned that SNC might be defunded at some point in the future. It's nice to see a small shuttle coming along, so that would suck if they did indeed get cut out.

Blue Origin didn't apply for the CCiCap award, so it was less a matter of being defunded, then it was their opting out.

It has been reported though, that they plan to continue development, funded by Bezos' investment.

Robert PearlmanEditor

Posts: 29868From: Houston, TXRegistered: Nov 1999

posted 06-27-2014 05:59 PM
Space News reports that NASA has quietly extended its current partnership agreements with two of the three companies developing commercial crew vehicles.

Both Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Sierra Nevada Corp. now have until March 2015 to complete milestones specified in their Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) contracts, which began in August 2012. The agreements previously were slated to end on Aug. 31, 2014.

An amendment signed by William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, on May 16 gives SpaceX until March 31, 2015, to complete the 14th and final milestone under its $440 million CCiCap agreement — a pad abort test of its Dragon capsule. The test originally was planned for April 2014.

On May 19, Gerstenmaier signed a similar amendment to Sierra Nevada’s $212.5 million CCiCap award to extend work associated with flight tests of the company’s Dream Chaser engineering test article until March 31, 2015.

NASA’s third Commercial Crew partner, Boeing, is on track to complete all its milestones, worth a combined $460 million, by the end of August...